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Yesterday, Silicon Republic posted its last ‘tweet’ on Elon Musk’s X, and will focus its attention on LinkedIn and Bluesky for sharing its content to readers. Ann O’Dea explains the reasoning.
It was only a matter of time. This week the management team here made the call that it was time to stop sharing Silicon Republic content to X, formerly Twitter, and yesterday we pressed stop. I just wanted to share our reasoning here. As it happens, The Guardian in the UK announced the same decision yesterday. I’ll be honest it was somewhat reassuring to us that we were not alone.
That said, we have always chosen to be leaders rather than followers at Silicon Republic, so we expect to be the first of many. No judgement here. It is not a decision that can be taken lightly for any publisher. For years Twitter was one of several important channels to reach and grow our audience in an ever more disparate media landscape.
It’s a challenging time for the legacy media – and yes at 24-years young, we are part of that club – but there was probably never a more important time for our readers to have reliable, authoritative and factually correct content to stay informed. Silicon Republic is not a personal blog. It is an online news and features service, and to that end employs qualified journalists and sub-editors, who publish fact-based content.
While all social media sites are imperfect, the misinformation and toxicity has truly ramped up in recent months on X, and we believe it is no longer right for us to have the work of our marvellous team here sit alongside such disturbing content.
It’s a big decision for an independent media brand such as us. But it’s a decision we have long been mulling, with the return of numerous truly dangerous accounts that had been banned under a pre-Musk regime. Moderation is hard, but X no longer even pretends to moderate. So here we are.
As a business and an employer we also have a responsibility to not take reckless decisions for the brand. But X is not the force it once was. In April, NPR in the US took the brave decision to stop posting to X. According to Nieman Labs, six months later an internal memo from NPR said the effects of leaving Twitter had been negligible, and that traffic had dropped by only a single percentage point.
LinkedIn, in recent years, has by multiples outpaced X as a driver of readers to Silicon Republic, but we have long been searching for an alternative short-post platform to X. We joined Bluesky back in August 2023, as even then it looked like the most viable solution for a news organisation. We don’t pretend to have all the answers, we have no illusions that BlueSky is perfect. However, unlike other social media platforms, it does not have algorithms that de-prioritise news, it has a strong block function for hateful content and has been designed to be customisable and open. In the words of Alex Kirshner on Slate: “Here’s Bluesky with no algorithmic feeds at all, just customisable timelines that people can opt into or curate themselves.” It therefore best matches what was once a very usable and useful Twitter platform for Silicon Republic.
A huge number of our followers interact with us on LinkedIn and that will continue to be a key platform for Silicon Republic. Find us here. And we do hope you’ll come see what all the buzz is about over at Bluesky. We can also be found over on Instagram, although we only post sparingly there.
Twitter was never perfect but in the early days it was a phenomenal way to interact with like-minded nerdy people, it was a superb way to reach our audience and interact with fascinating humans from around the globe. And there were safeguards – if imperfect – for blocking and reporting hateful posts and users.
Members of team Silicon Republic are free to be active on X – that’s their prerogative –and it may for some time remain a useful news gathering tool (thanks to Lists). X users will still be free to share our content if they so wish, However, Silicon Republic posted its last ‘tweet’ yesterday. And do you know what? It felt really, really good.
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